A reference guide to wine and food: look it up, and you'll remember it longer; screw it up, and you'll remember it forever.

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Sunday, September 23, 2012

FOOD BOOK OF THE MONTH! Meringue

1. MERINGUE (Gibbs Smith, 2012; distr. Raincoast, 224 pages, ISBN 978-1-4236-2581-0, $24.99 US hard covers) is by Linda K. Jackson (a food and beverage marketing executive) and Jennifer Evans Gardner (cookbook author and lifestyle writer). Together they came up with a single ingredient cookbook for the masses: you cannot have too much meringue and sugar for dessert! There's an extensive section on the history and development of meringues, a primer on how to do it (ingredients, tools techniques), followed by a selection of preps dealing with cookies, pavlovas, bars, tarts, pies, cakes, tortes, vacherins, dacquoises, meringue frostings, and more. There are three stages of meringue (foamy, soft peaks, stiff peaks) and three types (French, Italian, and Swiss). Preparations have their ingredients listed in avoirdupois measurements, but there is a table of metric equivalents.Audience and level of use: those looking for a meringue fix  what to do with all those egg whites after you've made crème brulee and crème caramel!Some interesting or unusual recipes/facts: death by milk chocolate; snowballs; s'moringues; meringue pizza; ile flottante with salted caramel and toasted hazelnuts; vanilla swiss meringue buttercream; raspberry white chocolate vacherin; southern black bottom pie; golden apricot bars.The downside to this book: no mention of nun's farts (pet de nonne, pet des soeur), but there is a chapter on "little clouds".The upside to this book: great single ingredient cookbook.Quality/Price Rating: 90.